A flower of precocious depravity

CCO, donated to Wikimedia Commons

One month now I've been working on the Rodin scene.

Almost not a scene, now. I'm at 3,500 words (my scenes average 1.5K)  But two fortunate things have happened; I've reached the end of the material I planned for the scene. And I looked up the details on Degas' ballerina sculpture.

Is there a lot going on with this sculpture, and even more, behind the scenes of this sculpture? Can we say, enough material for a ballet, a novel, a two-hour documentary and a stage musical?

Yeah. I thought Japan was bad. Doing a book in Paris alone is bad enough. Every street corner has history, and it is the kind of history that a lot of people know and care about. But doing one that is focused on the artist's colony of Montmartre in 1900? Ye gads.

The fortunate thing is that it became completely clear I can't go into the petit rats in this scene, not even in this part of the book. And that means the grisettes are off the table as well. Particularly for this scene, because Penny's new friend Amelia is being drawn into a romantic triangle between two artists of modern Montmartre, and half the Montmartre scenes are at a cafe named "La Boheme." So I'd rather not make it any more obvious than I have to what I am up to there.

I am still up in the air whether one of the chapter pull quotes in Part II is going to talk about the meat market at the foyer de la dance of the Paris Opera Ballet. Pretty much, I'm trying to push all that stuff into Part III, although I did have to talk about the "models and girlfriends" around the scene at Rodin's small country estate and studio in Meudon.

After finally getting off the phone and on the home computer, and seeing just how long that scene really was, I also figured out how to shift half a K of text about comic books out of the big Rodin scene and into the previous one on the grawlix-covered floor of the Pompidou center. A detail (from the 2006 Herge exhibition, not the later one) that I haven't seen mentioned or found photographs of so it remains a clue to the particularly well-informed reader.

I might go back and fill in later. I am planning to go back around after I've got a complete draft, to add more personal reactions to the art, some more philosophizing about art that isn't the somewhat cool and remote anthropological stuff I have now, and to dress up most of the "ate a croissant" stuff into a proper Symphony of Cheese. But for now, this scene does what it is supposed to.

Unfortunately, the final scene of this chapter -- and some key bits in the next -- is parkour.

Which means stopping again while I refresh my links on what turns out to be some pretty wacky philosophy that underlies this "jumping from roof to roof with a big flip in the middle" stuff.